Collaborative Robots Articles, Stories & News

Milestone investment will combine connected digital technologies, state-of-the-art collaborative robotics and cutting-edge artificial intelligence research to create the most sophisticated, automated and flexible Factory of the Future.

IoT and connected devices are making the development process more transparent. The technology also allows plant managers and overseers to accurately review operations, which leads to a more positive direction for everyone.

Adding robot systems to any stage in food and beverage manufacturing will help to increase throughput. Robots work consistently, around-the-clock allowing for dependable production rates. The latest innovations increase production flexibility and decrease changeover time.

Malek Murison for Internet of Business: Telepresence robotics and virtual reality are two exciting technologies, and by combining the two in a relatively inexpensive way, engineers at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a smarter and safer manufacturing tool.

Sarah Kessler for Quartz: Machines, you may have heard, are coming for all the jobs.
Robots flip burgers and work warehouses. Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping, manages investment portfolios, does legal research, and performs basic HR tasks. Human labor doesn’t stand a chance against them—after the “automation apocalypse,” only those with spectacular abilities and the owners of the robots will thrive.
Or at least, that’s one plausible and completely valid theory. But before you start campaigning for a universal basic income and set up a bunker, you might want to also familiarize yourself with the competing theory: In the long run, we’re going to be just fine. We’ve been here before. Cont'd...

Leo Lewis for Financial Times: Earlier this week, Japanese TV audiences glimpsed a potentially revolutionary contraption from the Matsue College of Technology that rapidly separates closed shijimi clamshells into those with a live mollusc inside and those without.
Cut to footage of a human sorter, expertly performing the same function at a rate of just 90 kgs of shijimi per day and whose job this machine seems destined to replace. In other parts of the world, the juxtaposition could seem cruel or politically charged; in Japan, it is almost celebratory. The great conundrum for investors — and increasing preoccupation of sellside analysts attempting to talk clients out of underweight Japan positions — is whether the equity market provides a neat play on Japan’s deepening worker shortage and the promised surge in wages that has to date been all gong and no dinner. Cont'd...

Lora Kolodny for TechCrunch: For Americans struggling with stagnant wages, under- or un-employment, one of Donald Trump’s most appealing campaign promises was to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
Navigating the complexities of policy, tariffs and geopolitics would make that hard enough already for the president elect. But technology will make this promise nearly impossible to fulfill.
Why? Because manufacturing jobs are increasingly done by robots, not people.
Robotics have already helped reduce reliance on labor overseas for manufacturers in automotive, electrical and electronics industries, according to a fresh policy report from the United Nations Conference on Trade & Development. Cont'd...

Dyllan Furness for Digital Trends: A London-based startup has combined some of today’s most disruptive technologies in a bid to change the way we’ll build the future. By retrofitting industrial robots with 3D printing guns and artificial intelligence algorithms, Ai Build has constructed machines that can see, create, and even learn from their mistakes.
When CEO and founder Daghan Cam was studying architecture, he noticed a disconnect between small-scale manufacturing and large-scale construction. “On one side we have a fully automated production pipeline,” Cam explained at a recent conference in London. “On the other side we’re completely dependent on human labor.” With the emergence of more efficient printing technologies, he thought there must be a better way.
“We wanted to push the boundaries of how intricate we could design things through computation and how we could create them through 3D printing,” Cam said. Cont'd...

Fanny Platbrood for SafeToWork: Human-robot collaboration (HRC) describes a work scenario in which humans and automated machines share and work in the same workspace at the same time. Driven by Industry 4.0, this model of collaboration promises highly flexible workflows, maximum system throughput and productivity, as well as economic efficiency. However, ensuring that HRC is actually able to live up to this promise requires exactly the right safety technology for the application in question.
One of the major issues associated with Industry 4.0 is making work processes flexible. At the extreme end of the spectrum, this may involve manufacturing products in batch size 1 under industrial mass-production conditions – that is, manufacturing unique items on a conveyor belt. Cont'd...

Paradigm Electronics is a manufacturer of high performance loud speakers and subwoofers. In trying to meet demand on labor-intensive products, Paradigm has now implemented Universal Robots in polishing applications, resulting in significantly increased production throughput eliminating bottle necks while improving the work environment.

Kristie Thong for Eco-Business: Amid concerns that the rise of industrial robots may soon render humans obsolete, Swiss automation giant ABB’s latest innovation may help shine a new light on what the future will look like when humans and robots can work together as partners. Full Article:

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